TELEVISION; Slums of New York Teem With Life and Death

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: August 19, 2012

Gangs of New York,'' Martin Scorsese painstakingly replicated the 19th-century tenements, saloons and almshouses of Lower Manhattan's infamous Five Points. On the sprawling back lot of a studio outside Rome, he recreated an incandescent vista of the pentagonal intersection that epitomized the world's worst slum.''Gangs'' delivered a dilated view of downtown, a CinemaScopic sweep of a Disney World Main Street -- but from the gutter up -- and the characters faithfully sported the garish kaleidoscope of get-ups that were as common then as the film depicted the conflicts (native-born Protestants vs. immigrant Roman Catholics, poor whites vs. blacks, Democrats vs. the new Republicans, uptown vs. downtown) that characterized Civil War New York. The colorful clothes draped sometimes monochromatic caricatures, though.">

TO film ''Gangs of New York,'' Martin Scorsese painstakingly replicated the 19th-century tenements, saloons and almshouses of Lower Manhattan's infamous Five Points. On the sprawling back lot of a studio outside Rome, he recreated an incandescent vista of the pentagonal intersection that epitomized the world's worst slum.''Gangs'' delivered a dilated view of downtown, a CinemaScopic sweep of a Disney World Main Street -- but from the gutter up -- and the characters faithfully sported the garish kaleidoscope of get-ups that were as common then as the film depicted the conflicts (native-born Protestants vs. immigrant Roman Catholics, poor whites vs. blacks, Democrats vs. the new Republicans, uptown vs. downtown) that characterized Civil War New York. The colorful clothes draped sometimes monochromatic caricatures, though.

A decade later, BBC America's first original series, the 10-episode ''Copper,'' which has its premiere on Sunday, inevitably invites comparisons. ''Copper'' begins a year after the 1863 Draft Riots in New York, where ''Gangs'' left off. Even before a single line is spoken, the contrast between the television series and the film is striking.

There is no sky in the Five Points of ''Copper.'' If the cramped images are an imperative of lower-budget television (a more modest indoor set was built in a 212,500-square-foot former auto parts plant in Toronto), they also infuse the series with an unsettling sepia claustrophobia or, as Tom Fontana, one of its creators, prefers, ''intimacy.''

Mr. Fontana, perhaps best known for the HBO series ''Oz,'' and his co-creator, the writer Will Rokos (''Monster's Ball''), were brought together by Christina Wayne, an executive producer of the show (along with Barry Levinson, who filled that role with Mr. Fontana on the 1990s series ''Homicide: Life on the Street''). Ms. Wayne, now president of Cineflix Studios, was at the time at AMC, where she helped develop ''Broken Trail'' and ''Mad Men,'' and where she first began working on ''Copper.''

Ostensibly the new series is about a former boxer and Civil War veteran turned police detective, Kevin Corcoran (played by Tom Weston-Jones), an Irish immigrant who returns to the Five Points after serving in the Union Army's 71st Regiment to find his daughter dead and his wife missing. New York is really the main character.

Where ''Gangs'' signed up as technical adviser Luc Sante, whose 1991 book ''Low Life'' evoked ''The Gangs of New York,'' Herbert Asbury's 1928 nonfiction confection, ''Copper'' is rooted in fiction -- Jack Finney's ''Time and Again,'' which Ms. Wayne read in high school at Manhattan's Hewitt School, and ''The Alienist'' by Caleb Carr, which she read more recently (as well as ''Low Life''). But the creative team also decided to hire a full-fledged historian, Daniel Czitrom, who teaches American cultural and political history at Mount Holyoke, to keep ''Copper'' believable. (Mr. Fontana is himself a self-styled would-be historian who started college as a history major.)

''It's a drama,'' Professor Czitrom said. ''I felt my job was not simply to be accurate about things that actually happened, but to make this as historically plausible as possible. My working approach has always been that you strengthen the drama and enrich the characters if you pay serious attention to history.''

Hewing to that advice, the show is sprinkled with details, like the intricate Marsh test for arsenic that a doctor administers in fledgling forensic toxicology (think ''C.S.I.'') and the posters heralding the 1864 presidential election. (In the ''Bloody Sixth'' ward, which included the Five Points, Lincoln lost 11-to-1 to Gen. George B. McClellan, whose son, George Jr., would be elected mayor of New York 40 years later.) The scriptwriters even relocated a temporary orphanage for black children, to replace the one burned during the riots, from the Five Points to farther uptown in the interest of historical credibility.

If nobody can replicate Daniel Day-Lewis's ur-New York accent in ''Gangs,'' Mr. Weston-Jones, who is English, credibly conjures what you'd expect an Irish immigrant veteran of the 71st Regiment to sound like. Professor Czitrom acknowledged that the 69th Regiment would have been more likely but said that the 71st, which began early in the 1850s as a Know Nothing outfit, by the early 1860s would still have been plausible.

While few remnants of the original Five Points are still visible, the filmmakers studied books like Tyler Anbinder's ''Five Points,'' Jacob Riis's searing photographs (taken in the 1880s, when the tenements, built on a swamp, were drooping even more), and archival illustrations at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the New York City Police Museum. Mr. Weston-Jones even visited McSorley's Old Ale House (established 1854) on East Seventh Street. ''The smell, the taste, sticks with you when you're playing the character,'' he said.

Delphine White, the series' costume designer, said that a creative decision was made about them too. As Mr. Scorsese's film showed, she said, ''in reality, yes, there were plaids and bright colors, but we wanted to really accentuate the abject poverty and the filth, and relay that through our color scheme. We decided it would be a much earthier feel.''

Gangs of New York,'' Martin Scorsese painstakingly replicated the 19th-century tenements, saloons and almshouses of Lower Manhattan's infamous Five Points. On the sprawling back lot of a studio outside Rome, he recreated an incandescent vista of the pentagonal intersection that epitomized the world's worst slum.''Gangs'' delivered a dilated view of downtown, a CinemaScopic sweep of a Disney World Main Street -- but from the gutter up -- and the characters faithfully sported the garish kaleidoscope of get-ups that were as common then as the film depicted the conflicts (native-born Protestants vs. immigrant Roman Catholics, poor whites vs. blacks, Democrats vs. the new Republicans, uptown vs. downtown) that characterized Civil War New York. The colorful clothes draped sometimes monochromatic caricatures, though.">